Downtown Johannesburg's Braamfontein district is an area awash with the cultural detritus of South Africa's recent history. It's a strip joint - a Las Vegas of political pleasure domes - littered with media groups, trauma centres for victims of political violence, socio-political watchdog organisations, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) as far as the eye can see. In Bruce Cohen's office at The Weekly Mail and Guardian, there is a sign in Afrikaans that reads, "The first kaffir in my school, I will shoot dead. Keep our schools white." A picture of a Boer youth in full cry accompanies the slogan. It's only when you see the newspaper logo buried in the bottom of the poster that you know that it's meant to be ironically hip - and a constant reminder of what South Africa has been about.
Cohen hunches over his PowerBook, looking smug. "Let me tell you why I believe in the Net: Lesotho, a former British colony surrounded by South Africa, has just had another half-hearted coup attempt. It doesn't even make the newspapers anymore, but this time there is more gunfire than usual. A journalist gets caught in the crossfire, and is seriously wounded. The local doctors think the best thing to do is amputate his leg. Another journalist gets wind of it, and posts messages on the South African newsgroups. Within half an hour, enough money has been raised to airlift him to Johannesburg. That's what the Net is all about - not Yuppie couples pouring over Manhattan real-estate Web pages."
Forty-year-old Cohen, assistant editor of The Weekly Mail and Guardian, has spent his working life running the gamut of those reform-minded South African newspapers that were a constant thorn in the National Party government's side. Cohen was, he says proudly, "probably the first white South African to be fired by a black man." Before the UK Guardian bought it out, The Weekly Mail stood for the kind of quixotic investigative journalism that Guardian readers living on a diet of pulpy Jonathan Aitken expos/s could only dream about. It found itself at constant odds with the apartheid governments of old. Since its formation in 1984, the paper regularly fought pitched battles to expose the brutality of the tottering political order; its journalists lived under the threat of detention, banning, and even death. Even after the advent of Nelson Mandela's government, The Weekly Mail and Guardian remains as vigilant, and as obstreperous, as ever.
Cohen heads up the paper's electronic media section, and invests his role with a kind of missionary zeal. "It's all about being wired. I started an electronic version of The Mail and Guardian in May, 1994. We were the first newspaper in Africa to do so, and at that time, one of the few in the world. Our mission is greater than just leveraging our brand, though. Our aim, and the aim of all the people we work with, is to make press freedom a reality in Africa. We are going to use the Internet to do that."
Cohen does not suffer from delusions of grandeur. He sits on the board of directors of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a feisty news organisation which acts as a press-freedom watchdog in sub-Saharan Africa. Since its inception in 1992, the group has attempted to highlight the abuse of African media, and to promote greater contact among journalists working there. Although Misa operates in the 11 countries that make up the Southern African Development Community, it has established electronic links with other African countries as well as the nonAfrican world. It has done so via its electronic arm, known as Misanet. The organisation recently joined the International Freedom of Expression Exchange in a bid to increase international awareness of free press violations in Africa.
Media freedom is not Africa's forte. A gaping hole in the pages of Malawi's daily newspaper - cut out by censors - recently confronted readers. Other newspapers have suffered financially when government pressure forced away advertisers. Worse, journalists can be jailed or banned - and sometimes they just disappear. As Cohen points out, "In Africa, journalists simply get killed in order to be silenced." Recently, the Angolan representative of the Zambian fax-news service ImparcialFax who worked with Misanet was shot dead. The world paid little attention. Misa catalogues such horrors, and hopes to end them by attracting international scrutiny. Misanet is the latest weapon in the battle.
Rabuka Chalatse, the journalist whose leg Misanet saved, can testify to its power. So can Fred M'embe, editor of one of Zambia's few independent newspapers, The Post. M'embe cofounded the paper in 1991, shortly before the fall of Zambian strongman Kenneth Kuanda which The Post precipitated by exposing the Zambian government's rife corruption. At first, M'embe was the darling of the new government, but soon it too began to indulge in repressive tactics. M'embe, who again spoke out, has been the target of an unrelentingly vicious official campaign because his feisty paper keeps the powers-that-be under constant scrutiny.
Misanet saved M'embe's life, says Cohen. "It's not hard to imagine what would have happened to Fred M'embe a year or so ago - a shot in the back, just another statistic. M'embe has been threatened and arrested on many occasions, but we've always been able to use Misanet to make people instantly aware of his plight." Misanet brings economic and professional clout, too. Peter da Costa, the Gambian local regional director of Inter Press Service, a newswire service out of Harare, Zimbabwe, says, "Misanet has created a sense of regionalism in a sea of insularity. Where papers in most African countries concentrated on narrow national stories and internal goings-on, they now report with a different perspective, taking on board the effects and implications of events in neighbouring countries. Standards of journalism are also being challenged by the fact that everyone posts their daily or weekly output on Misanet, where it is read by all members."
Da Costa also points out that some remote papers have started using Misanet as a means of reselling their content, thus opening up new economic opportunities - and possibly, new ways of resisting the pressures a government brings to bear when it quietly asks advertisers to take their business to a publication with less abrasive political views.
Indeed, Misanet's history brings together economics, politics, and idealism - born as it was of a combination of idealism and strategic newspaper marketing in May, 1994, just after South Africa had ushered in Mandela's new government. Cohen spotted the possible synergies between his own schemes for The Weekly Mail and Guardian and the greater cause of African press freedom.
"At the same time I was developing the Internet subscription service for the Mail, I became aware of a much bigger use for the Internet in Africa - the outlandish possibility of electronically linking up some of the newspapers in the region. Other newspapers saw what we were doing with our electronic subscription service and went on to start their own; The Post in Lusaka, Zambia, and The Namibian in Windhoek, now provide their own full-text subscription services. I saw something beyond that - journalists talking to each other, and sharing experiences without censorship. The logistics seemed too horrible to contemplate, but I went ahead with a proposal for the Misa board of directors. We got the funding from the Swedish Development Agency. Misanet was born and I got sucked into managing it."
Dauntingly ambitious, the collection of press-related information and services gathered under the Misanet umbrella provides:
- A low-cost e-mail network that allows members to communicate locally and inter-nationally. It now connects about 15 newspapers, radio stations, and other media.
- A newswire service: articles drawn from southern Africa's independent press and made available to members on a free syndication basis, as well as to third parties for a fee. In addition to articles from local papers like The Post, Misanet also carries the Inter Press news service. The news is free to Misa members. Outside of Africa, students can subscribe to a "read-only" news and features service (no reprinting) for US$80 (£60), individuals for $120 (£80). Media can negotiate its own prices. For more information, e-mail postmaster@ingrid.misa.org.na.
- Electronic distribution of the Misa news-letter, Free Press, which is largely about press freedom in southern Africa.
- A Misa contact list: e-mail, physical, phone, and fax details of all the independent - that is, not state-owned - media in the region, and a general Misa forum on which its members can exchange information.
- A press freedom forum with a link to other international press freedom watchdogs, such as Canada's International Freedom of Information Exchange.
- A training forum, including information on journalism training, courses, institutions, scholarships, and exchange programmes.
Misanet delivers all of these services - despite having to cope with some of the world's worst telecom infrastructures. Coming soon, Cohen promises, is electronic access to select news and information databases, and an archive of news photos. Cohen's Web site at www.mg.co.za/mg/ now offers searchable full text of The Weekly Mail and Guardian, Fred M'embe's The Post and some of The Namibian.
Misanet's very existence, Cohen points out, provides a singular testimony to the power of the Internet to overcome obstacles. Using simple store-and-forward technology, even very remote computers can dial into a more central server to download a day's e-mail, or request an archived file. Hop by hop, call by call, Misanet overcomes geography and draws its members onto the global information highway. As Cohen says, "It doesn't matter where you are. So long as you have a phone line you can participate. It really is an empowering technology."
But it hasn't been easy. As anyone who's tried to use a telephone outside South Africa will attest, telecommunications structure in Africa is a mess. The litany of problems includes a lack of skilled technical personnel, stifling state regulations, astronomical tariff barriers - and on and on. "There also isn't any standardisation," says Cohen, "Most of the time, the lines don't work.
"It's easy enough to get wired in South Africa," explains Cohen. "It's hellishly problematic to get wired in, say, Botswana. When we started off, we were enthusiastically attempting to wire everybody up, setting up modem links in the region. Initially, I did all the dirty work - setting up the list server, adding subscribers, etc. It was exciting, it was horrible. We were working with Mike Jensen, who is a kind of computer guru to NGOs in Africa. He was our foot soldier - we would send him off on a cheapo ticket around southern Africa, with a knapsack full of modems. Botswana was a classic case. One of the newspapers we connected up quite early was The Voice in Francistown. Now, Francistown is a remote place. It is about four hours from Gaberone, Bots-wana's capital, on a long and sandy road. Jensen got to Francistown, wired it up and left. After he had gone, somebody deleted the comms software, and there was no backup. There was no one to help, so they had to wait a couple of months before somebody could go back up there to reinstall and reconnect. They had a helluva lot of e-mail!"
Jensen has had more trips through Africa than Stewart Granger, working tirelessly to set up telecom networks on the continent. Along the way, he has provided assistance to GreenNet, the activists' network in London, and to Canada's public access system, The Web. He's currently working on a project for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa that aims to get the whole continent seriously wired - at a cost of $10-$20 million (£6-£13 million).
Jensen says, "Misanet was rough, but it was exciting. We found out that if you bought a return ticket between Johannesburg and Dar-es-Salaam, there's a whole lot of places you could stop in between. I'd arrive at airports with the modems and pretend that they were part of my hand luggage, which was excruciatingly painful because I had to make it look like it was very light. Not a very easy thing to do with a bag full of modems, cables, and plugs, particularly when the telephone jacks are all different from city to city. In the end, the rewards were great, though - the pleasure of empowering people, of watching different cultures being brought together by the same technology. The feedback was tremendous."
Fortunately, a few solid networks did exist upon which Jensen could build. Misa operates a multiuser machine at its head office in Namibia. Uninet - the Internet service provider to universities in South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Swaziland - has played a major role in helping to develop connectivity for emerging African systems. Most Misanet subscribers run a BBS offering dial-in service to journalists and others; that BBS, in turn, connects either to a university machine or to Misa itself. Finally, through a connection that the US firm Sprint provides, Uninet has a 64K leased line to the United States. Thus, the byways merge into the highway.
In the final analysis, Misanet works precisely because of its medium, however rickety the infrastructure. It would simply cost too much to fax so much information to all of Misa's members, explains Cohen, and the postal service is beyond hope. Cumbersome though store-and-forward may be, it is, nevertheless, one of the most efficient ways of using the sporadic, intermittent telephone services that Africa has to offer. But technology is only part of the story.
"This project is not about organisations; it's about people," Cohen enthuses. "You can't throw technology at people and expect everyone to take to it. But the response has been phenomenal. Even places like war-ravaged Mozambique have three or four sites. It's spinning off in lots of directions."
One happy customer is da Costa. He says, "Misa has done an incredible amount for press freedom - first by creating the electronic network linking independent newspapers in southern Africa, then by engaging in constant advocacy. It works increasingly effectively as an early warning mechanism of press freedom violations, taking advantage of the fact that e-mail is - in the best possible way - subversive. It takes information control away from the government, and passes it to the people. There are very few independent newspapers in Zimbabwe, and in general, very little pluralistic debate about governance or development. The only daily is the pro-government Herald, which is self-censorious - as is Ziana, Zimbabwe's official news agency. Ziana has a monopoly over distribution of news agency material to the media. Zimbabwe has several Misa members who can now circumvent the official news agency and get independent reports off Misanet. Our hope is that similar networks will be established in other areas - the Indian Ocean states, for example. That way, information can be disseminated and received in the most effective way possible."
Misanet's growth has led to another spinoff: helping entrepreneurs. One of the service's biggest users is the Dimba newspaper in Tanzania. The newspaper itself doesn't run to many pages, but its owners have hit upon a novel way to earn some extra cash - selling information. Since most of the other newspapers in the country don't have computers, Dimba resells information from Misanet to them. No one is complaining. Lately, Cohen has left much of Misanet's daily running to others, but he still casts an avuncular eye over the setup. Recently, he has spent his time developing a Misanet Web site. "It was the next logical step - or jump - on the bandwagon. The site offers access to all of Misanet's services - its aim is to give worldwide exposure to Misanet. We can publicise the plight and working conditions of journalists in Africa, and thereby get support from our peers." (The URL was unavailable when Wired went to press).
A fighting press has been Cohen's life. A baleful tinge colours his voice as he reflects upon the changes that have come to the southern-African region. "It would be no exaggeration to say that the independent media is at a crossroads here. Some countries are going through painful births - Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi. Zimbabwe is doing its best to destroy all vestiges of a free press," Cohen says. "South Africa is interesting; we have a new government, and a new relationship. Under apartheid rule, its raison d'être was absolutely clear: fight the government. Things are different now, but there is enormous tension building up between the government and the media. South African Vice President Thabo Mbeki says that the relationship between the press and the government should be adversarial, but not hostile. There is a lot of hostility. What is becoming an increasingly powerful factor, however, is the role that technology is going to play in shaping the continent. You can destroy newspapers, kill people, but you can't stop satellite transmission."
Sean Badal is a tall, dark, and moody freelance writer in Johannesburg, South Africa. In his spare time, he listens to schlocky '70s Elvis albums.